474 Wookey Hole. 



the present day, in the upper valleys of the Jura, good- 

 sized streams are engulfed in swallow-holes of marly 

 Miocene beds, to pass into the Jurassic limestones below, 

 and again to reappear as ready-made rivers in deep 

 transverse valleys, as, for example, in the Val de Travers 

 below Combe Varin. The removal from the surface of 

 the Mendip Hills of such strata by ordinary denuding 

 agents, must have occupied a period of time long and 

 of unknown duration. 



There is, however, another view of the subject which 

 cannot fail to strike a reflective mind with wonder, 

 speaking as it does so strongly of time. In those 

 caves which were not hyaena dens, thousands of bones 

 of grazing animals and of carnivora, are found crowded 

 together ( in most admired confusion.' Lions and 

 hyenas did not specially prefer to devour their prey at 

 the mouths of swallow-holes, nor was the surface of the 

 ground strewn broadcast with bones of carnivora and 

 other mammals, like gravel-stones on many a fresh 

 ploughed field; and when we think of bones, horns, 

 and teeth, 6 by the thousand,' in so many large caverns, 

 most of which must have been washed in by very slow 

 degrees, the mind, for this reason alone, becomes power- 

 fully impressed with the idea of the long endurance of 

 so-called Pleistocene time. 



On the south side of the Mendip Hills, about a mile 

 and a half north-west of Wells, there is a hyaena den 

 called Wookey Hole, which has been hollowed out in 

 the dolomitic conglomerate, which in so many places 

 fringes and lies unconformably on the Carboniferous 

 Limestone. 



This cave was discovered in 1852, and from 1859 to 

 1863 it was systematically explored by Professor Boyd 

 Dawkins, the Eev. J. Williamson, and Messrs. Willett, 



